Extreme heat recorded before CO2 began rising

While Americans were being stampeded at great cost and inconvenience into combating the presumed horrors of manmade global warming, some news largely went unnoticed last week.

Instead of 1998 being the “hottest year” in the continental United States since 1880, as some global warming alarmists claimed, it turns out 1934 was.

Instead of nine of the 10 hottest years since 1880 occurring after 1995, it turns out four of the hottest years were in the 1930s, and the third hottest was 1921. Only three have been in the past decade.

This is significant not merely because it means things aren’t necessarily getting warmer. It also means manmade CO2, presumably global warming’s cause, may not be.

That’s because the 15 hottest years now are spread over seven decades, more than half occurring before CO2’s sharp rise in the atmosphere. Of course, drawing connections between climate change and temperatures, whether daily or annual, always has been problematic.

Weather and climate are different things, but they often have been comingled in the heat of the debate.

This shamefully underreported development came to light when a private blogger and mathematician, Canadian Stephen McIntyre, discovered a serious math error made by NASA, which monitors U.S. temperatures. NASA’s sheepish response was to quietly acknowledge the error, briefly note the correction on a Web site and thank McIntyre for his trouble.

Prominent global warming zealot James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies feebly tried to downplay the corrected numbers, saying U.S. temperature readings account for only 2 percent of the earth’s land surface. But as McIntyre noted, the significance of what he calls the “Hansen error” extends beyond U.S. temperature readings.

While U.S. temperature measuring stations are of questionable reliability, nevertheless they are far more sophisticated and therefore likelier to be more accurate gauges than foreign stations.

The assumptions of global warming theorists increasingly seem built on sand, not bedrock. You may say, “Doesn’t an overwhelming majority of scientists believe man is behind global warming?” Not quite.

“It’s like an urban legend,” former NASA scientist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama recently told columnist Debra J. Saunders. In 2003 two German environmental scientists asked 530 climate scientists from 27 countries if global warming was manmade. Fifty-six percent said yes. Thirty percent said no, Saunders reported.

Some scientists flatly say there’s been no global temperature increase since that supposedly so-hot year of 1998. Others say solar activity causes warming. Still others predict the earth is on the brink of worldwide cooling.

We don’t presume to have the answers. But we’re highly suspicious of those who claim unequivocally global warming is dangerously escalating, man is its principle cause and it’s necessarily devastating.

Some things are certain. Global warming alarmists won’t be discouraged easily. Neither will those seizing on the dire warming projections to expand their control or reap profits from Draconian economic schemes like greenhouse gas cap-and-trade plans, essentially licenses to buy and sell make-believe “rights” to pollute.

Contrary to alarmists’ claims, global warming science is far from settled. As politicians and opportunists try to stampede us, we must ask, “What’s the rush?”